Ocean preserve: Bush plan recognized a need to protect

Published 5:30 am, Tuesday, September 9, 2008

President George W. Bush, to put it mildly, has a less-than-stellar record on the environment. It has been the consistent practice of this administration to loosen standards for clean air and water, and to misrepresent the science that supports the need for protecting wildlife and habitats. That's the assessment not only of environmental activists but of scientists, medical experts and academics from a wide range of disciplines.

But where praise is due, it would be wrong to withhold it. Happily, Bush does deserves great compliments for a plan he has devised to protect several huge swaths of pristine Pacific ocean within U.S. jurisdiction. The total area of the proposed protection zone is 900,000 square miles. If realized, the sites would comprise the world's largest marine sanctuary.

According to news reports, Bush asked a number of Cabinet secretaries to work out a means for protecting areas of the Mariana Trench, the Rose Atoll in American Samoa and the Line Islands, which are a long spray of atolls and reefs in the central Pacific. The Mariana Trench is the deepest area on planet Earth, large enough to hold Mount Everest.

The proposed zone of protection is so immense because the area is likely to include all the area of water within 200 miles of each island or reef that breaks the surface of the ocean.

The action is stunning in an administration that typically has been more interested in allowing commercial interests to exploit federal lands for profit than in establishing environmental protectorates.

Actually, though, this is not the first time President Bush has undertaken to safeguard marine life and habitat. In 2006, Bush set aside a group of remote islands covering 84 million acres to create a national maritime monument, now known as the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. It's an area that is, as the president pointed out, more than 100 times bigger than Yosemite National Park.

The importance of creating such ocean preserves cannot be overstated.

Today, there are some 150 dead zones covering from a few square miles to as much as 45,000 square miles of water. These are areas that are so oxygen-depleted from pollution runoff that they can sustain no life. One of the best known such zones is in our own Gulf of Mexico. Other ocean areas are polluted with vast flotillas of decomposing plastic that blot out the sun and choke off marine life. Overfishing in some places threatens to disrupt the ocean-based food chain on which humans depend for sustenance. Meanwhile, global warming is wreaking its own havoc on the delicate web of sea life.

As vast as they are, it is now clear that the health of the planet's oceans cannot endure unlimited assaults by human beings. The Bush plan acknowledges this reality and takes concrete steps to preserve and protect priceless and irreplaceable marine life and habitat.